Final impact

Discarding the launcher he picked up his assault rifle, an AK-47 clone identical to the ones carried by the other fighters. He squeezed off a round with a thick, flat crack! It went high, and he adjusted his aim before methodically picking off any uniformed personnel he could see below. Where the Chukchi poured in torrents of fire, the veteran special operator nailed each of his victims with one or two shots.

The volume of return fire quickly died away, and he called out to Kicji. “Let’s go.”

The last of the Koryak yelled out a few words in some impenetrable northern dialect, repeated almost immediately by other voices up and down the valley. Suddenly the slopes were alive with guerrillas, throwing themselves downward onto the remnants of the escort.

“Prisoners. We need prisoners,” Ivanov called out before jumping up to join them.

He and Vendulka half ran, half fell down the steep incline. The footing was treacherous, and two or three times he was forced to let himself drop onto his ass and slide part of the way. Here and there single shots, or short bursts of automatic gunfire, rang out. As he made the shoulder of the road he checked the time hack in his goggles. It was a quarter past midnight.

“Ahmed, Sergo,” he called out. “Quickly. We need prisoners before any response force gets here. Move, before the Chukchi kill them all.”

He and Vendulka ran for the second truck, which remained relatively unscathed. As they dashed forward, leaping the bodies of the fallen, he noted that troops wore NKVD uniforms, not Red Army. It made him feel a little better about the slaughter.

“Ivanov, over here.”

It was Sergo. The Cossack was pulling a man wearing civilian clothing out of the back of the truck. The prisoner howled in pain. One arm looked as though it had been struck by a bullet. He appeared to have two elbow joints, with the second one in the middle of his forearm.

“Go,” he said to Vendulka. The medical specialist ran forward, pulling a canvas bag full of supplies off her back.

Meanwhile Ivanov slowed down and looked to the night sky. The heavens were alive with cold, hard diamond points of light. He took off his goggles. He didn’t need them. The fires from the burning trucks and armored personnel carriers provided more than adequate light to see the Chukchi stripping the bodies and occasionally killing a surviving NKVD man.

“Kicji,” he called out, “tell them to spare any officers they find. We need to interrogate them.”

The old Koryak guide shrugged. “They will not like that. They came here to kill Russians.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…then tell them to spare the officers because I want to torture them,” he said, barely containing his impatience to be away.

“Ah, that they will like,” Kicji said.

Ivanov inserted a fresh magazine into his weapon as Ahmed Khan dropped down from the back of one truck.

“Five civilians,” Khan said. “Three dead. One wounded. One simply shitting himself.”

“Gather them up and let’s get going,” Ivanov said. “We won’t have long.”

They had chosen the ambush site because the Bolsheviks’ radios would be unlikely to work well in the folds of the mountains. Lord knew he’d had the same trouble in Afghanistan more than once.

But you could never be certain of anything. They needed to get to the hideout and start questioning the prisoners as soon as possible.

28

D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 0354 HOURS.

MOSKVA, SEA OF OKHOTSK.

The fleet carrier Moskva was the pride of the Soviet navy, although Admiral Yumashev would be prouder when he commanded a ship that was truly the product of Soviet labor and ingenuity. The Moskva was merely a copy of a British carrier that had been impounded at Murmansk for two years, and a rough copy at that.

Hastily built in the new shipyards at Vladivostok, she lacked even the rudimentary comforts of her British model, and that ship had been positively Spartan by the standards of the Vanguard. The commander of the Soviet Pacific Fleet had enjoyed a single tour of the Emergence ship, and been amazed-not just by her perverse situation, sticking out of the tundra in the Siberian wilderness, but also by the level of comfort the crew had enjoyed before the Emergence had killed most of them.

Or that was the story anyway. Yumashev knew better than to ask questions about their fate.

Sitting in his chair in the center of the Moskva’s bridge, surveying the fleet in the dim red glow of the surrounding volcanoes in the Kuril chain, Yumashev could only wonder what sort of power might be his to command in ten or fifteen years’ time. The Pacific Fleet had grown from next to nothing at the start of the war into a mighty force, as the Japanese had discovered to their chagrin. It was amazing what could be achieved when the virtually limitless resources of the workers’ state were applied without regard to any consideration other than success. Even so Yumashev was well aware of the fleet’s shortcomings.